Avaya acknowledges Nortel dealer discontent

Avaya has acknowledged the complaints of some of the Nortel enterprise partners absorbed into its channel during the course of 2010, and pledged to begin to monetise the Nortel lines in the coming months.

In a tubthumping speech to partners of both vendors, who assembled at Avaya's annual conference in Barcelona this week, Avaya EMEA president Michael Bayer said: "A lot of Nortel partners felt things got worse."

"A lot of you thought it was just about upgrading legacy Nortel systems to Avaya, and it's not" he said.

Bayer said there was now a growing need to invest more in the Nortel base to enable it to start using Avaya's collaboration tools effectively.

Paul Brewer, technology solutions director at Datapoint, said he was not yet seeing many Nortel partners encroaching on the Avaya business.

"They have tended to keep themselves to themselves," he said.

Brewer added that this situation would probably now change, and said he expected to see Nortel partners making more inroads into Avaya's traditional business areas.

Value-added resellers and service providers interested in reselling Aruba networking hardware and software can learn the benefits of becoming an Aruba Networks partner with this standardized checklist. Compare Aruba's reseller partner program with other vendors' offering similar products.